So, I started watching Anne with an E on Netflix, and it really brought me back.

Little backstory on my kindof weird internet username (seeing as my name isn't Laura but Hilde...) : I made it up when I was about 8 for some online game. Back in that time I LOVED the "Little house on the prairie" book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Since "Laurafan" was taken already, I used "Lauragek", which is a way in Dutch to say "crazy about Laura", basically a synonym to Laurafan.

When I was around eight, I used to dream about traveling through America, inspired by the Little House on the Prairie books. I wanted to travel through the vast prairies and stretching forests. All we had around the city I lived in was "the glass city": many many hectares of greenhouses. All grassland we have has been heavily farmed for centuries, the whole Netherlands only has a little over 1000 km2 of woods. After some years, I stopped dreaming of traveling to America, when I learned that the prairies don't really exist anymore as they too have been converted to farmland...

Ten years later I was dreaming of traveling to America again, this time thanks to Jeffrey Lewis, specifically the song "Roll Bus Roll". I don't know what in that song made it sound appealing to me, but I wanted to cross the United States from East to West, starting of ourse in New York, seeing what was left of the prairies in the middle, and ending at the westcoast. In the end I went for the option of skipping the middle and just flying from New York to Los Angeles... I'm still not sure if it would or wouldn't have been a good idea to send just-turned-eightteen-year-old-me to take the greyhound bus accross the US. But it sure was a great trip, in which I DID manage not only to catch a gig of Jeff's, but actually stayed at his place for a night after we found out we had booked our hotel one day short, and were invited to attend a band practice for the Tuli Kupferberg memorial which was great!

Now I'm wondering what crazy long distance travel I'll be dreaming of in a couple of years... Currently I am trying to save up to make a trip to the other side of the earth and visit a good friend of mine in New Zealand. Being a big fan of the Lord of the Rings makes visiting a friend on the other side of the world very appealing, with all the scenery from the movies there!

I'm not into travelling at all, it's just stressful and I like being at home too much. I have a lot of opportunities to travel but mostly turn them down. I know s
someone that is away in all corners of the world at least half of every month for work and it just sounds like hell to me! Other people like going new places and seeing new cultures but I like to read about them in books.
I find media things creep into my dreams a lot, there must be something about the part of the mind that activates it being the same as when we are asleep.
Thanks for explaining your name, I had no idea what it was about but now I do. x_________________The only difference between our secrets is whether we allow them to evolve into tales of heroism or fear.

Just yesterday I finished "Rundherum" (Roundabout), a travel account by Klaus and Erika Mann, children of the famous german author Thomas Mann. They travelled in 1927 from Rotterdam to New York by boat, and then actually did cross the US to go to Los Angeles, like you mentioned! From there they went to Hawaii, Japan, Korea, Russia, Poland and back to Germany.

They didn't really have much money and had just planned to go to the US, with a vague idea of wanting to see Hollywood, and decided the rest along the way. It's a short, interesting read, though I'm not sure it has been translated.

This sort of aimless way of always travelling further reminds me of a time a few years ago, when a fortunate combination of work, study and free time allowed me to travel from Luxembourg to France, Spain, Portugal, to Cabo Verde and finally Sao Tome and Principe, on the equator. That was all during a five month period, some of it was planned, but some was also improvised, and I liked this idea of always going onwards, always further south.

Now I just sit at home, go to work... sometimes I get to travel to Brussels by train, then I read books and dream about travelling while listening to some Jeffrey Lewis...